I have attended a few classes in adult education in Film History and Analysis. There were a variety of people there. Some were using the courses as an opening into university education, some are not working and pursuing it for interest, and some were hoping it wouldl give them a job.

Adult education is like this. About ten years ago, there was a problem with funding and people were worried if it would be able to continue. Non-vocational courses were particularly jeopardised. The centre where I went was is in a notoriously depressed part of Manchester, but is clearly a thriving community based venue. Adult education ranks very high as a community activity in fragmented and alienating cities.

Film for me has an underlying romantic aura, derived from childhood and teenage years. As a social activity with family, friends and then girlfriends, it is soaked with Saturday memories. I recall my first film, when I stood up with excitement and shouted "There's Bambi!" I remember watching both Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Sound of Music. The former frightened me (the child catcher) and the latter upset me: I could sense that people were very troubled (escaping the Germans), but could not understand why.

As a young teenager, the Pearl and Dean da da da da da da da da da da da, da da da da da daaaa pow! was the beginning of another delight, starting with a 20 or 30 minute support film. In the interval, a hot dog was part of the treat. I recall a Sinbad adventure story, James Bond films that my mother was not sure I should be watching (all those half naked women), and a silly story based around a car called Herbie.

I remember trying to get into Ken Russell's Tommy with a few other underage school-friends, and failing to convince them that we were 18. We had been talking about it all week, and the agony was particularly acute because the accompanying girls did arrive - we were not sure if they would - and they managed to get in without us.

A few years later, my first date with my first girlfriend was at the same cinema. I cannot recall what we set out to watch, but it was either full or not showing and my credibility plummeted when the only alternative was Pete's Dragon - a childish Disney story. We later watched The Exorcist, Friday the 13th, and then Friday the 13th 2, when I decided I did not like horror films. We also watched one or two Bruce Lee movies, which partly inspired me to begin karate lessons.

At Lancaster University I used to go to film society presentations in a lecture theatre, and occasionally at the Dukes Playhouse. In Brighton I went to the complex on the sea front and The Dukes, I think it was called, which was the art-house venue. There I watched Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books and Ai no Corrida.

In the classes, we talked about the early days of cinema, and how New York Nickelodeons attracted vast numbers of working class immigrants. For them, it was a wonderful escape from daily ardour. This reminded me of one of my favourites: Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso. It fits perfectly my romantic delight in cinema, as an illusory escape from reality: one of its central themes.

Cinema and psychoanalysis were born at the same time. The Lumière brothers screened their 'cinematograph', in 1895, when Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer published Studies on Hysteria. Cinema offered a collective sense of what Freud called the uncanny: the screen images were both familiar and strange, alive and also lifeless, real and illusory. Film, psychoanalysis and the fashionable interest in spiritualism and Theosophy reflected current social consciousness. All three were an experiment with reality.

Bernardo Bertolucci has been in psychoanalysis since the late Sixties, and said

I found that I had in my camera an additional lens which was not Kodak, not Zeiss, but Freud. It is a lens which really takes you very close to dreams. For me movies, even before knowing Freud, have always been the closest thing you can imagine to a dream. First of all, the movie theatre in this amniotic darkness for me has always been like a womb, so we are all dreamers, but dreamers in the womb. We are there in the darkness. And it's very rare having a collective dream all together. We're dreaming with open eyes the same dream - which is the movie - which we receive in different ways. If you ask at the exit of the theatre what the story was, you will have many different stories. I always felt that the time in a movie is not the time of realism, it is not the 'real' time of the watch, but it is the same time that you have in dreams. We all know that in dreams time does not exist.

Childhood experiences are commonly associated with cinema, in the 'amniotic darkness... like a womb'. Analyst Andrea Sabbadini thinks that seeing a film 'is similar to what happens in psychoanalysis' - for a brief period, you are taken outside of your normal world into a timeless arena. 'And then of course we have to emerge from it,' he says. 'We leave the session or the cinema, and have to be careful crossing the road.'

Sabbadini adds that there can be something 'regressive' about spending large amounts of time at the cinema. 'People who hide in the dark of a cinema for hours a day are certainly trying to avoid something about reality outside the cinema,' he says. 'There's an element of addiction which is close to being pathological.' Woody Allen once said

I constantly escaped into the cinema... You would leave your poor house behind and all your problems with school and family and you would go into the cinema and there they would have penthouses and white telephones and the women were lovely and the men always had an appropriate witticism to say and things were funny, but they always turned out well, and the heroes were genuine heroes and it was just great.

Many of his films depict in various ways his long-term interest in psychoanalysis, and some of them explore the boundaries between cinematic fiction and reality.

Cinema Paradiso is one of my favourites films, because it expresses many of these interests. It shows the childish delight in cinematic escape, and a growing love for film that culminates in an adult career. At the end, Salvatore is presented with the censored film clips that he never saw as a child. His childhood mentor saved them for him, and his eyes fill with tears of delight, nostalgia, ironic pleasure, love for his old friend, and lost years.